Jennifer Aniston has an interview with the LA Times this week, really just to keep her name out there during her Emmy campaign for The Morning Show. She confirms something I didn’t know about TMS – they stopped production on the show in March, only having filmed two episodes of the new season, and now the rest of the season is being re-written to incorporate the pandemic. They had to do something similar with the first season, which is… basically go back to the drawing board and incorporate more sexual harassment and sexual abuse stories within the show as Matt Lauer got outed as a predator. Anyway, you can read the full LAT piece here. Some highlights:
On The Morning Show: “That show was 20 years of therapy wrapped into 10 episodes. There were times when I would read a scene and feel like a whole manhole cover was taken off my back.”
The show forced her to go on a cleanse about how fame has affected her for decades: “Cathartic, yes, and also interesting for me to look at how I always have tried to normalize being fine and ‘everything’s great, you know, this is all normal,’ and then there are moments when you have your private breakdown or your ‘Calgon, take me away’ moment. To actually look at it from an actor brain observing it and acknowledging it, I had to look at it as opposed to pretending it doesn’t exist.”
She’s had moments where she doesn’t want to attend events: “There have been moments — not to that level of hysteria — but moments of ‘I don’t want to f—ing go here,’ ‘I don’t want to walk out onto the carpet,’ ‘I don’t want to be seen,’ ‘I don’t want to be looked at and everyone’s going to be talking about me and judging me’ … that’s real. I just loved being able to walk into it and lean into it and not be ashamed of it, but actually just … it was like … Ooooooooooh.”
Her pandemic life: She has a “bubble” of four families that rotate among their homes and never go outside the pod. The kids have grown up together and know one another, so they have a good time, and “it’s all lovely,” Aniston says. She’s reading, watching a ton of TV, veering between things like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and the James Baldwin-centered examination of American racism, “I Am Not Your Negro.” And “Lenox Hill,” the Netflix medical docuseries, because Aniston was addicted to “Trauma: Life in the E.R.” back in the day and loves watching the stories of doctors and healthcare workers, particularly at this moment in time.
On ageing & living longer: “I look at my dad, who just turned 87, and he is Greek — stubborn, fabulous, all those things from that generation — but, you know, I think they could be a little healthier. He’s going to be so mad at me… You know, my mom, c’mon, none of you guys took care of yourselves. But they didn’t know any better. And now we know. So what’s our excuse? It’s about just knowing what you put inside your body, exercising — my father, never, ever — they didn’t know you could keep your bones strong, never mind being fit and fitting into a size-whatever. I’m going to be in my 80s or 90s or maybe now even my 100s at this rate, and I don’t want to be wheeling around. I would like to be vibrant and thriving.”
Jennifer obviously has a close (goddess) circle of friends who have been in her life through thick and thin for decades, and I’m sure many of those goddess-circle friends are moms and that Aniston is probably godmother (or a godmother-figure) to some of her friends’ kids. But I consistently find it odd that Aniston makes all of these references to having kids around her – she did that in her Interview piece earlier this year too, saying she saw her future as “I hear the ocean, I see the ocean, I hear laughter, I see kids running…” And the way this is worded: “She has a ‘bubble’ of four families that rotate among their homes and never go outside the pod. The kids have grown up together and know one another…” It’s like she has secret kids, right? That would actually be sort of amazing if she managed to pull that off. One day she would just announce “my secret kid just graduated high school” on her Instagram.
As for the stuff about ageing… all she did was convince me that her father’s Greek genes are really sturdy and that so much of ageing and longevity is about genetics, not about diet or fitness or “mindfulness” or whatever is the New Age terminology now.
Photos courtesy of WENN, Avalon Red, Backgrid.
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